Apple

Apple's 3G iPhone will soon gain a feature that it currently lacks compared to most other 3G smartphones – the ability to act as a modem for the computer it's attached to. At the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega said that a firmware update would soon be available to allow "tethering" – in other words, for the phone to make its data connection available to a PC or Mac. Generally, notebook owners use this for getting a fast data connection when out of reach of Wi-Fi.

A U.S. District Court judge in New York ordered a newly hired Apple Inc executive to stop work immediately because he might be violating an agreement with his former employer, IBM.

Federal District Judge Kenneth Karas in White Plains ordered that Mark Papermaster "immediately cease his employment with Apple Inc until further order of this court."

A GERMAN BOGGER has apparently been fiddling with the developer release of the next iteration of the Iphone OS and has discovered that the not-yet-announced update will allow users to download video and audio podcasts without resorting to Itunes.

Genuine-looking screen shots show a podcast being downloaded over a 3G network so it looks like the functionality will not be restricted to wifi connections.

Apple appears to have taken its campaign against iPhone modders to a baffling new level, tweaking its new MacBooks and MacBook Pros to disable a popular software tool used to jailbreak the handset.

According to discussion groups here and here, iPhone and iPod Touch users who have unlocked their devices using the Pwnage Tool are unable get their new MacBooks to recognize the devices. Instead their all-aluminum machines display an error message saying "An iPod has been detected, but it could not be identified properly."

Apparently Apple has found a way to at least theoretically disable iPhone unlock software. It’s been reported by users of HowardForums that the most recent Apple Macbooks somehow disable the popular Pwnage iPhone software unlock tool.

Pwnage tool requires iPhones that are about to be unlocked to be swtched into DFU mode, but once that’s done the new aluminum Macbooks simply cannot recognize the device.

Italian systems engineer Piergiorgio Zambrini won fame and money last year when he created "Ziphone," the first widespread application that unlocked iPhones to run on mobile carriers other than AT&T. Now he's making another bid for the spotlight by revealing a bug that can crash the iPhone and, he says, other devices including iPods and Apple computers.

One of the long standing problems with Hackintosh Netbooks is the audio jack would never work. The speakers would work just fine, but the audio jack would remain dead. Thanks to some hard-core hackers that has changed. Using a custom audio kernel, CHUD (in XCode), and a shell script you can re-direct the speaker output to the headphone/audio jack. While it isn't as easy as plugging in a headphone and having it just work, it is a working solution for a Mac based Netbook (until Apple surprises us and releases one).

Putting Intel Corp.'s Moorestown chip package inside a future version of the iPhone would make the smart phone less secure, according to an independent security researcher.

"That will make the iPhone x86, and that will make a lot of attacks easier," said Dino Dai Zovi, an independent security researcher, in an interview at the Hack In The Box security conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Apple Inc. has never said it intends to use Moorestown in future products, but Intel is widely believed to be hopeful that Apple will adopt the chip package.

As it is, Apple is notorious for sneaking undocumented features into their software updates. Therefore it’s not too surprising that a new undocumented feature appeared with iPhone firmware v2.1 update.

According to Clancy, a reader of AppleInsider, iPhone firmware v2.1 has introduced a feature that doesn’t seem to have much use for, but is nevertheless rather interesting due to how it’s possible to implement it.

Last week some family members suffered a corrupted hard drive on their only PC. They had no backup. They're relatively light computer users--no online banking, no important business documents--but the lesson still hurts. Their e-mail contacts weren't too hard to recover--they simply called everybody they had regular e-mail contact with and told them to send an e-mail. Their digital photos are gone forever, unless emergency tech support courtesy of their son-in-law produces a miracle. And their music library?